Zloth

Community Contributor
NVIDIA has supported stereoscopic 3D for a long time before 3D Vision with things like 3D Discover, which used the old red/blue glasses trick to do 3D. In around 2008, they switched to shutter system built into the video drivers themselves. The basic idea was to have LCD glasses that could switch from clear to dark very quickly. The screen would show an image for the left eye while the right eye was blocked by the glasses, then the glasses would switch to block the left eye while the monitor showed a different image to the right eye. There was a little pyramid-shaped emitter to put on your desk that the video drivers would use to keep the glasses in sync without having to wire the glasses to the PC.

The technology worked very well! Especially as monitors got better, so the pixels on the screen could switch faster. (Earlier monitors wouldn't be able to change from bright color to dark fast enough, leaving a 'ghost' of the image still visible when the other eye got to view the screen. The moon caused that effect a lot.)

If you're thinking about how movies' 3D effects work, think again. 3D is goes by the triangulation using precise angles of where your eyes are pointed. If you move even a little closer to a nearby object, your eyes have to move, changing the angles. Movies have to try and make the effect work for a whole big room! Even TVs have to try and make it work for a living room. The only way they can do that is by making the effect pretty small. So maybe the distant mountain looks to be a couple of feet inside the screen. With 3D Vision, your head is only going to move around a little, so the effect can be fine-tuned to look real. A tower that's miles away looks like it's miles away. A gun pointed right at your nose will stick way out of the monitor! When the effect was working well (and your monitor was clean), it was hard to even figure out where the screen was without reaching out to touch it!

While the effect worked great, the games could sometimes be difficult. One common problem was particle effects. For instance, there would be a torch in the game. NVIDIA's drivers automatically worked with the 3D models in the game world and calculated the images for the left and right eyes so the torch itself looked fine. However, the flame would be calculated later as just a flat flame then placed at the x/y coordinates of where the torch is on the screen. In 2D, you're none the wiser. In 3D, the flame is much closer to you than the torch, and either to the right or left of the torch, depending on which eye was seeing it! Blah. Game developers rarely would fix this (3D Vision never got popular), but a team of modders would mess with shaders in much the same way as ReShade works and would often fix games.

Other games just don't fit well with 3D. Some are obvious - why use 3D Vision with a South Park game? Games with a lot of info on the HUD were a problem, too. If the HUD info was supposed to be above/around some 3D object (for instance, the name of a character hovering over the heads of people in MMOs), it will act like the torch flame and be in the wrong place. Even if it's just static screen stuff, like a hit point bar at the top of the window, you could get in trouble. Say your screen is 2ft away and you get your point of view so it's 1ft away from a book shelf. The triangulation tells you the book shelf is closer to you than the hit point bar, yet the hit point bar is covering up the book shelf, so it must be closer! Funky!!

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Guns are a big problem, too, because games actually do them crazy. In real life, you would close an eye then put the gun in front of the other eye to look down the sights. In video games, you have only one eye, so you put the gun on your nose to look down the sights! 3D Vision makes it clear that's what's happening and it's about as hard to aim right with 3D Vision as it would be to aim when putting your gun on your nose. Modders would typically just push the targeting reticle way into the distance to fix the issue. Also, 3D Vision made it VERY easy to simply switch the system off with a keystroke, so you could turn off 3D Vision while in a gunfight, then turn it back on afterward.

When it was working well, 3D Vision was awesome! It's vastly more realistic when your eyes are properly seeing everything at depth. When you're taking Lara over a rope bridge in 2D, you can tell by all the visual cues that falling is going to kill you. When you do it with 3D Vision, IT'S A LONG DAMN WAY DOWN!!! Claustrophobia can even mess with you, if you need to crawl through some little cave while the next area loads.

NVIDIA even provided a way to save 3D screenshots. NVIDIA didn't mention it in any documentation, but the developers made it known in the forums. You could even pick if it used side-by-side JPG (.JPS) or side-by-side PNG (.PNS) files. Naturally, I loved this!

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But 3D Vision never got popular. As I mentioned earlier, the monitors early on had some issues, plus people just didn't want to wear "dorky glasses" while playing. After 10 years, NVIDIA pulled it out of their driver updates and new video cards wouldn't support the system anymore.

It's up to Virtual/Augmented Reality to take over, now. VR has some definite advantages over 3D Vision. 3D Vision is confined to your monitor so, while the world looks much more real, you're still seeing it through a window. I just hope my screenshots can work in it.
 
Parents TV is 3d, we have the goggles somewhere. I was never into movies so didn't watch any with them

I think I have Mad Max in 3d. I got it on dvd one year but never played it. I guess I should before TV dies.

3d might finally be here to stay in VR, its tried a few times since the 1950's
hard part with 3d is the headaches.
 
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3d tv will take a while to take off as apart from movies, I doubt there is much TV filmed in 3d yet. If its anything like 8k, I expect there are lots of nature videos... and i for one wouldn't be happy unless you can see everything in scene from all angles, and Good luck filming that any time soon :)
I agree. It's still a long way off. I'm not even sure if it will ever come to fruition and be somewhat mainstream.
 
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I see bandwidth problems trying to broadcast 8k 3d tv live. it won't be over the air. Tb connection speeds will need to exist for more than just researchers.

The tech to retrofit 100 years worth of movies/TV to work with it would be prized (by the audiences) and also hated (by those who can't remake them all badly and have to make up their own stories... wait, that will never happen, remakes are all we have now.)
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
I don't see 3D TV working very well. Big screens could work great if you could tune the 3D to be optimal for where one person was sitting, but you can't do that. 3D Vision could do that because the video drivers had the 3D model, so the drivers figured out just how much separation there should be based on your settings. With movies/TV, all it has is the right eye channel and the left eye channel - the calculations were already done according to somebody else's settings. So, like movies, they have to keep the effect toned down. Or they have to try and guess the 3D model based on what is happening in 2D - which can kinda work... sometimes... a little....

When I first got 3D Vision, I kept the effect toned down (as the instructions said I should). That made a really weird effect. It was 3D enough that I could see various objects were closer or further away. However, the effect was muted enough that there wasn't any real depth to those objects. If you were to, say, look straight at a car - the front of the car and the windshield would seem to be the same distance. So, at least for me, everything looked like a bunch of cardboard cutouts! It was kinda cool, but not what I wanted. ;) (Psychologists into sensory perception must have loved these things.)

3D doesn't cause headaches. If that's happening, something else is wrong: bad focus, dirty glasses, image is too dim... but it's not the 3D. All that does is get your eyes to point in the right directions, which they do all the time when not looking at a screen.
 
3D doesn't cause headaches. If that's happening, something else is wrong: bad focus, dirty glasses, image is too dim... but it's not the 3D. All that does is get your eyes to point in the right directions, which they do all the time when not looking at a screen.
I'm not sure how true that is, though. When I tried to play on a 3DS, the 3D kind of gave me headaches. With that, you can scale the intensity of the 3D effect. I would scale it all the way down, and it wouldn't bother me. So it didn't have anything to do with dirty glasses or the image being too dim.
 
how would a 3D effect give you a headache?
From a decade ago:

6 years ago:

12 years ago:

7 years ago:
 
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"The wider you separate the cameras, the more 3D volume there is," says Phil McNally, global stereo effects supervisor at Dreamworks Animation. Shooting for a big screen and scaling down reduces 3D volume; shooting small and scaling up creates too much 3D, which is headache-inducing for viewers.

3d isn't a new idea

As for the audience's role, filmmakers in the 1920s (and as recently as the 1980s) used overlapping red and cyan images—known as an anaglyph—to create stereoscopic movies. Audiences wore glasses with red and cyan lenses, which ensured that each eye saw only one of the two overlapping prints and allowed the brain to create a 3D image.

fixing the headache problem is ongoing
 
I don't remember how the 3DS worked, but how would a 3D effect give you a headache?
The 3DS screen used a parallax effect to simulate 3D. So to get the best view of it, your eyes have to be positioned just right, and even crossed just right a little. If your eyes aren't positioned just right, it's going to be a little wonky. When you go messing with your eyes in unnatural ways like that, it can definitely cause some people headaches.
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
Going off the first article...

"A study of 115 South Koreans watching 3-D screens close up found that 3-D caused more eyestrain than 2-D. The research prompted the Korean government to recommend that viewers take a break of up to 15 minutes after an hour of 3-D viewing. But that study was based on glasses with red and green lenses rather than the ones used in theaters and with TVs. "

Pthththth. Those work by absorbing the light, making the whole image darker. Turn the brightness too far down on anything and you'll get a headache trying to look at it for a long time. Reading a book with dim lighting, for instance. The 3D Vision glasses were still slightly dark even when clear, so 3D monitors actually crank up the brightness to make up for it.

"Based on an unscientific, online survey, the American Optometric Association estimates that 25 percent of Americans have experienced headaches, blurred vision, nausea or similar problems when viewing 3-D. "

Cheap survey. Lots of people get nausea when playing video games without 3D, too. You need to do a proper study to establish what's causing headaches and what isn't, then compare that to other stats. Unfortunately:

"Research into how today's 3-D screens affect viewers is only in its early stages. There have been no large-scale scientific studies. "

The 3DS screen used a parallax effect to simulate 3D. So to get the best view of it, your eyes have to be positioned just right, and even crossed just right a little. If your eyes aren't positioned just right, it's going to be a little wonky. When you go messing with your eyes in unnatural ways like that, it can definitely cause some people headaches.
I got to see a LOT of wonky! Just turn the glasses upside down and each eye is getting the other eye's picture. That doesn't mess with your eyes, though, it messes with your brain. You've got to bother muscles to get a headache.

So, something else must have been going on. Eyes trying to focus in an odd way, maybe? I remember talk about dissonance in VR because your stereoscopic angles are telling you and object is far away but your eyes still have to focus like the object is super-close. I don't know how close a screen has to be for that effect to show up.
 
Going off the first article...

"A study of 115 South Koreans watching 3-D screens close up found that 3-D caused more eyestrain than 2-D. The research prompted the Korean government to recommend that viewers take a break of up to 15 minutes after an hour of 3-D viewing. But that study was based on glasses with red and green lenses rather than the ones used in theaters and with TVs. "

Pthththth. Those work by absorbing the light, making the whole image darker. Turn the brightness too far down on anything and you'll get a headache trying to look at it for a long time. Reading a book with dim lighting, for instance. The 3D Vision glasses were still slightly dark even when clear, so 3D monitors actually crank up the brightness to make up for it.

"Based on an unscientific, online survey, the American Optometric Association estimates that 25 percent of Americans have experienced headaches, blurred vision, nausea or similar problems when viewing 3-D. "

Cheap survey. Lots of people get nausea when playing video games without 3D, too. You need to do a proper study to establish what's causing headaches and what isn't, then compare that to other stats. Unfortunately:

"Research into how today's 3-D screens affect viewers is only in its early stages. There have been no large-scale scientific studies. "

I got to see a LOT of wonky! Just turn the glasses upside down and each eye is getting the other eye's picture. That doesn't mess with your eyes, though, it messes with your brain. You've got to bother muscles to get a headache.

So, something else must have been going on. Eyes trying to focus in an odd way, maybe? I remember talk about dissonance in VR because your stereoscopic angles are telling you and object is far away but your eyes still have to focus like the object is super-close. I don't know how close a screen has to be for that effect to show up.
I don't know if you ever played on a 3DS, but you didn't need to use glasses with it. The reason 3D can give you headaches is because no one has perfected it yet, and your eyes are focusing in an unnatural way. The way you're arguing against this almost seems like you've never had a headache before. Just because you've never experienced it definitely doesn't mean it never happens.
 

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